**will send free PDFs to anyone requesting and free hard copy to anyone interested in writing a review (make such requests to bartonsmock@yahoo.com)

~

some recent poems:

[dark earth]

animal then man then woman. god was the god of grief. one saltwater thing to another

why
a garden?

–

shadow

you unusable
rag

~

[his impressions of the experiment]

my closest frat brother looks at the toad and says frog motherfucker. tackles me. fact: there is a certain kind of toad that by staying still can kill a drug dog. in this country, a man can sell doves from the back of a white van. a man can run out of doves. my ghost is obsessed with caterpillars. it doesn’t matter what you say. they found that woman.

~

[pastoral enormities]

poverty a calendar we pay for monthly. birth a loudmouth. my other yacht is a crow.

I’d have gone grey
smelling
his hair
and he
to smoke
during the gospel
of the bruise

~

[mannish]

being alone never hurt anybody. I ask online about a coat hanger. in person about a stork. symbolism is dead. it’s not that kind of garden.

~

[remotion]

“There is no time for comedy; every stone regains hope and dies immediately.” – Frank Lima

sleep,
the clueless angel of a working elevator…

(father likes to say
a cricket
in a stone
is not
trapped)

meal of the orphan
part orphan

~

[beneath the mirror’s toothbrush]

the doll and the dummy wore for god a wire. she had a dog whistle and she a rape. my fist grew faster than my mouth. your dad was asking a ghost looking for its head how to hold a baby. thunder what it remembered. your mom the palmreader with a broken wrist was pumping milk…

~

[cleaning the stroller]

lifted from the eyesight of a torn seagull

the beached outhouse of a father’s mermaid

~

[I am, emptiness, out of breath]

in a wet dream on fire
the arsonist
fills
the mouth
he is trying
to leave

(it is not hunger that eats the horse)

I am past the age of what
in a former life
I died as, a spoon

is a fork

asleep in the hand of god

~

[the museum of minor fictions]

simpler, then

the seizure
that set
your father
to music

the baptized
bowl
of your mother’s
hair

the book I brought to burn
blank
as always

the pair deciding which hand
would come between us
which hand
would enter…